THE DEATH OF CLAUDIUS OR MUSHROOMS FOR MURDERERS

BOTANICAL MUSEUM LEAFLETS

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

Cai

idge, Massachusetts, Apkii. 7, 1972

Vol. 23, No. 3

THE DEATH OF CLAUDIUS

OR

MUSHROOMS FOR MURDERERS

BY

R. Gordon Wasson

Tit illos bolctos , voluptarium venation , nihil
oculti operis iudic.as facere, etiam si
praesentanei non fuerunt.

Seneca the Elder, Epistle XCV
to Lucilius.

For murderers there is only one kind of mushroom
worth considering: Amanita phalloides. Almost every¬
one who dies from mushrooms dies from it; and most
of those who have eaten it have died from it. Even a

small

Specimens

identify and

find

in our

latitude from August into October. Their poisonous

virtue survives cooking,
more accurately, the dead!
for we must add Amanita i

freezing, dry

rn

i

U

speaK

/

all three resemble each other so closely both in appear¬
ance and toxic properties that the murderer, whose ends
after all are empirical, will disregard the distinctions as
academic. He looks for white gills, veil (or ring), and
volva, taking care not to be misled by any of the inno¬
cent amanitas, such as the citrina. On the autopsy table
the victim shows pathological lesions of the viscera, but
unlixe the case with arsenic, the pathologist cannot iso-

[ 101 j

late the lethal agent, whose identity he must inter from
the ease history supplied by the attending physician, plus
such evidence as can be assembled to show that the vic¬
tim had eaten the lethal fungi.

From the murderer's point of view, the deadly amanita
suffers from one shortcoming: an occasional victim, after
days or weeks or even months of shattering illness, slowly
recovers and returns to circulation. True, he is only a
frail replica of his former self, but he is alive and has
foiled the murderer's coup. On the other hand, if the
murderer also hates his victim, and if success attends his
undertaking, his worst instincts and hopes will have been
more than satisfied by the slow progress and horrible
suffering that attend the victim's downward course into
the grave. The symptoms of poisoning by the deadly
amanitas are distinctive, dramatic, and terrifying.

To begin with, the lethal amanitas taste good—on this

the abundant testimony

%

voice. Not him? arouses

of victims shows no dissenting
suspicion as the greedy

diner

consumes his fateful dish: nor does he suspect anything
tor many hours thereafter. Indeed, the distinctive mark
of this poison, its veritable signature as Dr. Dujarric de
la Kiviere has aptly called it, is the period of absolute
quiescence that follows the ingestion of the mushrooms.

a period that never lasts less than six hours, and usually
ten or twelve, sometimes twenty or even forty or more.

* m/

'The victim goes about his affairs blissfully unaware that

the fingers of death are entwining him. Perhaps he speaks
with relish of the mushrooms he has eaten, and may ask
for another helping of the same kind at the next meal.
If they h ave been served to him intentionally, his mur¬
derer, standing bv. eves him with wicked and dissembled

solicitude, alert for the inevitable moment. Of a sudden
the victim is gripped by appalling abdominal

followed by vomiting and diarrhoea foetida. Neither

emetics nor purgatives can help him now, i'or his system
has absorbed the venom during the long period of‘ silent
invasion. The initial seizure is followed by utter prostra¬
tion. which in turn is succeeded by another paroxysm
like the first, and this alternation continues, perhaps for
many days, until the victim, his pulse fast and weak,
succumbs, usually after a delirious phase. The appear¬
ance of the patient meanwhile is marked by what

physicians describe as the H

facies

the

eves

unken

staring as though with anxiety or terror,

skin over the cheekbones taut and parched, nose pinched,
temples hollow, ears leaden and cold, their lobes turned
out, lips relaxed, the

whole face

irbinger of imminent d

d

an appearance

Our lugubrious, even sinister, approach to the toxic
fungi presents the elementary facts that should be known
to any detective story craftsman who resorts to mush¬
room poison as a device in the construction of a plot.
The art of the detective story is a minor literary genre
proliferated by the English-speaking peoples. Its leading
exponents are often conscientious in their scientific re¬
search. But when thev invoke mushroom poisoning.

ible of artistic perform

Celtic

Anglo-Saxon

races inhibited all

dark recesses of the

repellent subject. Mushrooms remain a mystery to
mystery writers.

Before examining the texts, we must mention two
other kinds of toxic mushrooms. First and foremost
there is Amanita muscaria, erroneously regarded by
many laymen as preeminently the poisonous mushroom.
Its evil reputation far outruns its deserts. It gives its
name to ‘muscarine’, the atrent that most physicians and

many

regard

he English-speaking world
mushroom poisoning. But

the facts are that muscarine is seldom if ever
it is destroyed bv cooking, and that it exists in A. mus¬

caria onlv in traces. One would have to eat kilograms

* O

of fresh A. muscaria to induce a muscarine reaction, and
far more for a lethal dose. In the English-speaking
world this spectacular mushroom labors under a tabu,
originally I believe religious, which wielded such power
that it seeped out and infected the whole wild mushroom
world—the world of ‘toadstools'—to the point where
the idea of eating them strikes panic into the normal
Englishman's being, be he ever so brave. The victim (or
beneficiary) of A. muscaria , following a stupor accom¬
panied perhaps by vivid dreams, is traditionally imbued
with a sense of exhilaration, of living in new dimensions
with miraculous mobility; but these are the result of

drugs new to science and now

first time bein

st udied.

Of the remaining toxic mushrooms, there is a peculiar
mystery about Oyromitra csculcnta , a common species
much eaten (as its name suggests) in central Europe.

Certain it is that at intervals cases occur where an indi¬
vidual dies from this species. The explanation may not
be surely known, but if the best opinion available today
proves right, dyromitra csculcnta offers us a notable
fungal peculiarity. It seems that everyone may cat this
tasty mushroom with impunity for the first time. But
occasionally there is an individual who, if he returns to
a mess of the same species shortly thereafter, and if the
mushrooms are fresh rather than dried, suffers a danger¬
ous or even fatal anaphylactic shock.

Dorothy L. Savers with Robert Eustace in The Dock-
meats in the Case produced the supreme example in Eng¬
lish of a mystery story based on fungal poisoning. An
eccentric Englishman, (leorgc Harrison, made wild

mushrooms his hobby (he was obviously eccentric), and

in the end was found dead (as his fellow-countrymen
would expect) in a lonely shack. The evidence indicated
that he had recently eaten a mess of stewed mushrooms
prepared by himself. The coroner after chemical analysis
of the uneaten remains of the stew put the death down
to accidental muscarine poisoning. The victim's son,
Paul, was not satisfied, because he was certain his father,
a careful man and excellent amateur mycologist, could
never have confused Amanita muse aria with an edible
species, and in the end he ran down the real culprit, a
lover of Paul's stepmother, a villain named Robert
Lathom. who in due course was proved to have intro¬
duced synthetic muscarine into the stock that had served

for the mushroom stew. I

and

hanged. The story is well told, with delightful touches
revealing the mycophobic mbits of mind of the run of
Englishmen. Rut it suffers from one defect: muscarine

is destroyed by cooking and could not have caused the
victim's death. Furthermore, tlie toxicity of fresh mus¬
carine is exaggerated: the chances were excellent that
Harrison would survive an uncooked dose. Lathom

should have used pieces of A. phalloidcs , not muscarine,
and for informed readers, his execution was a painful
miscarriage of justice, a tragic sequel to an incompetent
performance by Defense Counsel.

M iss Sayers an d Mr. E ustace used, or misused, a
genuine mushroom. More often English authors create
fictional species, tailored to fit their plots. Ernest Rramah
in The Eyes of Max C xi rr ad os tells a story entitled “The
Mystery of the Poisoned Dish of Mushrooms’. It hinges
on the peculiar properties of a non-existent fungus on
which he bestows a name unknown to mycology, ./ mun¬

it a bhuroides. (This name sounds like a misspelled de¬
rivative of Burrhus, a personage in attendance at the
imperial court of Claudius and Xero.) it is so deadly

that the victim expires within a half-hour of his seizure.

More notable than Amanita bituroutes is the fictitious
“Panaeolus sherrijj'ohles ", as we shall call the mush¬
room that the playright U.C. Sherri If’ devises for his
drama Miss ?tabel. I is plot is unhappy, lor we are ex¬
pected to sympathize with a kindly, somewhat demented
heroine who poisons her wealthy and hateful sister, the
widow Fletcher. The mycophile watches with astonis h¬
ment as the author, by a very act of creation, invents his
mushroom and clothes it with precisely those attributes
that the plot requires. It appears in the spring: the daf¬
fodils are in bloom and Faster is yet to come. (I n nature
there are almost no mushrooms then.) It grows fast,
progressing noticeably in the course of a night's rain.
A cluster of nine serves as the lethal dose, but the play¬
wright suggests that fewer would have sufliced. When
cooked, the mushrooms smell like hot rubber, but the
smell is successfully overlaid with onions and tomatoes.
Most remarkable are the toxic properties. These fungi
are a powerful narcotic and put the victim to sleep at
once. The widow Fletcher departs this life without pain,
uerugi V, resentful face assuming in death *a look of such
peace and gentleness* that the audience is presumably
reconciled to her hurried departure at the hands of her
sister.

Yet another inventor of mushrooms is H.G. Wells in

his short story. The Purple Pi/eus. Here a mild-
mannered, milk-toast of a man named Coombes, lower
middle-class, finds himself

browbeaten by his wife and
, to the point of desperation

and suicide. He rushes from the house into the woods.
He thinks of drowning himself, but suddenly notices all
the varied mushrooms around his feet. A purple pileus
catches his eye, 'a peculiarly poisonous looking purple’,
slimv, shining, emitting a sour odor but not disgusting.

Coombes breaks off a piece, and the creamy white of the
inside changes in ten seconds to a yellowish green color,
which suggests what the modern world knows as a bole¬
tus. He remembers that his father had described this
very species to him, and they were the deadliest poison.
He tastes the thing. I t is pungent. He almost spits it
out, but then it seems merely hot to the taste and full-
flavored, a kind of German mustard with horse-radish.
H e swallows it. There ensues a curious tingling sensa¬
tion in his finger-tips and toes. His pulse quickens. The
blood in his ears sounds like a mill-race. He loses his
balance, falls, forgets everything. While he lies there
unconscious, a peculiar transformation takes place in his
personality, for after a while he wakes up feeling bright
and cheerful, his complexion a livid white, his eyes large
and bright, his pale lips drawn in a cheerless grin. The
mild little man is now a lion, lit to be master of his
house. He goes home, and in a scene of violent retribu¬
tion he imposes his will on his wife and that noisome
friend of hers. He is so successful that the reformation
in his household proves lasting, and the whole course of
Coombes's life is changed for the better.

Coombes's exhilaration might suggest that he ate
Amanita muse aria, but Wells expressly distinguishes
his purple pileus from that other species, ‘the red ones
with white spots'. Wells, like Bramah and Sherriff, fills
out the necessities of a given plot by inventing the
needed mushroom, on which we here might facetiously
bestow the name of Boletus icellsoidcs.

Have Knglish authors ever invented flowers or shrubs
or trees with which to adorn the Knglish countryside.'

seems unlikely

nded

they never fix their gaze, they usually ignore them, and
on the rare occasions when ‘toadstools' are needed, they
blithely misrepresent them, to make them serve an
odious or exotic purpose.

[ U)7

With Wells and Sherrill’ anti Hramah, we observe a

ophobi

in its

unconscious and spontaneous workings. Doubtless many
other examples could be assembled, and we shall men¬
tion a few. Hut first let us note and celebrate one excep¬
tion. Anne Parish in her nov el The Perennial liaehelor
dispatches one of her characters by means of a dish of
mushrooms. Unlike all the other writers about whom

we speak, she shows herself thoroughly

in

t lie

properties of the deadly amanita. The episode is only
incidental to her plot, and this makes the accuracy of her
details even more astounding. It is not as though she
had worked hard on mushrooms and then hung her story
on them.

In December 19H) Kllerij (Queen's Mastery Magazine
published a yarn by August Derleth in which the mur¬
derer killed his victim bv substituting for morels some

%/ *, _ 1

specimens of Gyromitra cseulenta —a species that no vil¬
lain bent on murder would ever rely on. In Murder
icitfi Mushrooms, ‘Gordon Ashe' (pen name for John
CTeasey) has his victim die the same night that he dines
on poisonous mushrooms—a tragic sequel that could not
occur. In K.T.M. Scott's Ann's Crime , the victims in¬
hale spores o\' Amanita pha!loides that have been con¬
cealed in a cheese cloth inside a pillow, and forthwith
they die, for no doctor, we are told, could save a person
whose head had once touched that pillow! .... Has
there been a single writer of detectiv e or mystery stories
who has done justice to the genuine drama hidden in
the properties peculiar to Amanita p/ad/oides(

The C German author Gustav Meyrink in his Hat JMa-
cabre deals with mushroom intoxication. The story is
drenched with a pathological atmosphere artfully con¬
trived. There is much about mushrooms in the narrative,
but the hallucinations that hanir over the whole story

seem to us to be best explained by the effects of alcohol,
an alcoholic’s nightmare about toxic mushrooms. Mev-
rink reveals no knowledge of fungal toxicology. The
prolific American writer Percival Wilde in his Tinsley's
Hones , published in 1942, introduces as a witness a
knowledgeable female mycologist who seems to be ad¬
dicted to mushrooms of the genus Panaeolus as a substi¬
tute for cocktails, the author and his character displaying
thereby an astonishing command of mushroomic eso-
terica; but mushrooms in this yarn were not the agent
used lor the murder.

The facts about lethal mushrooms are to be found, not
in standard medical reference works, but in mycological
publications. They are well summarized in John Kams-
bottom's A Handbook of the Larger British Fungi, an
indispensable reference book, which however still charac¬
terizes Amanita mappa as poisonous, ignoring the work
done by the French with this species, Good instances
of poisoning by the deadly amanitas appear in a Canadian
Government publication, Mushrooms and Toadstools , by

H. T. Giissow and W. S. Odell. Certainlv the best

worked up case history in any language is the account
of the tragic end of a Madame Boyer and her daughter
Elodie, more than a century ago, retold with dramatic
suspense and pathos by Camille Fauvel in his delightful
little book, Lc Champignon qui tuc, published in Paris
in 19*26. The best sintrle source of information about all

the toxic

believe. Les Ch

Toxiqucs et Hallucinogenes, by Roger Heim, published

by Boubee in Paris.

%

M ycologists are prone to exaggerate the importance
of mushroom poisonings in history. In their writings we
repeatedly find a list of eminent persons who have died
allegedly from eating poisonous mushrooms, a list that
they copy from each other without verification. Some-

t 1 "9 ]

times we read that Euripides lost his wile and two
daughters thus, an assertion unsupported by any ancient
text, apparently based on a misreading of Athenaeus.
We read that Pope Clement VII—he who is remem¬
bered ehiellv lor his tribulations with Iienry VIII of
England—was a victim of poisonous mushrooms. This
Pontiff*died on September 2.5, 1.531. The date falls in
the season of the deadly amanita, but the records show
that Clement's symptoms first manifested themselves

M

course of his

fluctuating illness from that moment is well documented.
We disco\ er in the record no trace of the telltale syn¬
drome. As his biographer Emmanuel Kodocanachi sagely
observes, ‘In accordance with the custom of those times.

people attributed his death to poison.*

1

l hen there was the case of the Holy Homan Emperor
Charles VI, father of Maria Theresa of Austria. I le had
been worried and run down. ‘On the 10th ( of October

L.

17 to] at night his complaint was increased by an indi¬

gestion, occasioned by a dish of mushrooms stewed in
oil, of which he ate voraciously.* So wrote Archdeacon
William Coxe in his History of the House of Austria.
Ten days later, on October 20, while the doctors were
still arguing about the diagnosis, he surprised them by
dying. The clinical details that Coxe supplies to us. in¬
cluding the patient's sudden death, are compatible with
poisoning by the deadly amanita: we have only to as¬
sume that the physicians out of a sense of decorum played
down the unpleasant details of his last illness. There were
no allegations that the poisoning, if such it was, was de¬
liberate. 11 fungi were the agent, he is the one important
personage in modern times thus killed. His end precipi-

1 Ihstoire de Home: Les Pontificate d' Adrien I I et dc Clement l //,
Librarie Hachette, Paris, 1938. See also Ludwig Pastor, The History
qf the Popes , London, 1910, Vol. 10.

tilted war and it is on record that Voltaire declared ‘a
pot of mushrooms changed the history of Europe*.

Most remarkable is the persistence in mycological
writings of the assertion that Tsar Aleksei of Russia or
his widow died from mushrooms. Sometimes the texts
name him, but more often her. As to the Tsar himself.

death

know

unrelated to fungi.

The source of these reports is to be found in a footnote
that appears on page 111 of Jean-Jacques Pan let's classic
Traitc des Champignons , published in Paris in 1703, read¬
ing as follows:

I/accident arrive a la veuve du

Alexis, qui s’empoisonna

avec des champignons qu’on avait gardes pour le carcme, et rap-
porte par Mfiller, est de notre siecle.

The accident that befell the widow of the Tsar Alexis, who was
poisoned by mushrooms that had been set aside for Lent, as re¬
ported by Mfiller, belongs to our century.

Paulet's remark would arouse skepticism in any Russian.
In winter (especially during Lent) the (ireat Russians
eat an immense quantity of mushrooms, dried and mari¬
nated. The Tsarina would of course have enioved the
pick of the harvest. Had she been the victim of deliber¬
ate poisoning, we should certainly not be indebted for
our information about this event to a mycologist writing
in France almost a century later. The Russian Court
chronicles woidd have reported the episode and the at¬
tendant furore. If a mistake was made (which is almost
incredible), everyone who shared in the dish would have
succumbed. No one in Russia has ever heard of such a
traiiedv.

Paulet refers to a book by *Midler', Vol. I I, p. 59. In
vain did we look for it, until one day we came across an
essay on this very citation by a Russian, B.P. Vasil kov,
the specialist in the higher fungi residing in Leningrad.

[ HI

Mis Russian text lias never been published, but it was

translated out of Russian into

and published in

JM ykologieky shorn ik. in 1955 (no. .‘5, pp. (>3-05, and no.
t, pp. 97 _ 0‘.)). a mushroom journal so obscure that few
inside Czechoslovakia see it and only we abroad. It
seems that when Paulet refers to ‘Midler' he means
Friedrich Christian Weber, whose Das Ueriinderte Russ-
land first appeared in Frankfort in 17*21, and again in
German in 1729 and 1738. An Fnglish translation. The
Present State of Russia, came out in two volumes in
1723, and a French version, also in two volumes, in
1725, entitled Xoaveaum Mi 'moires sur /' Ktat present de
la Grande Russie on Moseovie. Some copies of the
French edition were wrongly bound, carrying on the
title page by mistake the heading of a chapter Res
Moeurs et Usages des Ostyakes , contributed by .Johann
Rernhard Midler, a Swedish prisoner-of-war living in
Siberia. Endowed with a rare gift of serendipity, I5.P.
Vasil kov came across one of the misbound copies in the
M.E. Saitykov-Shchedrin Public Library in Leningrad,
and there in Volume II, p. 59, was the telltale quota¬
tion showing precisely where Paulet had made his mis¬
take. (Vasil kov was the one man in millions who would
grasp the meaning of what he had found.) The French
source reads:

I-a Czarine Douairiere, veuve du feu Czar Alexis, etant mortc au
Carcmede Tannee 1713, on ouvrit son corps, \ Ton trouva (jue
la principale cause de sa maladie, etoit d "avoir trop mange de ces
champignons marines, pour observer le jeun plus regulierement.

In the English text, Voi. I, p. 333. this is the translation :

The Czarina-Dowager, Relict of the bite Czar Alexius, dying in
the year 17 13, during Lent, her Body was opened, and it was
found, that her Indisposition was chiefly occasioned by eating
too much of those pickled Mushrooms, out of Devotion of strictly
observing her Fast.

So there is no question of poisonous mushrooms,

merely overindulgence in delectable pickled mushrooms.
The German author Weber was incapable of understand¬
ing the Russian appetite for mushrooms and credits the
Tsarina Dowager with an excess of pious zeal! The
French mvcologist Paulet. with a clear French text be¬

fore him, was

incapable of distinguishing toxic mush¬
rooms from an excessive indulgence in good mushrooms !
A long succession of other writers, undoubtedly myco-
phobes at heart, have accepted Faulet's account without
verification, on the mycophobe’s rule-of-thumb that
nothin^ bad said about mushrooms can be undeserved.

But the imbroglio does not end here. The German

O

edition, as we said before, first appeared in 1721 in
Frankfort. In it Weber had attributed the death from
mushrooms, not to the widow of Tsar Aleksei, but to

wid

V. and this account survived in the

later German editions. But the widow of Ivan V was
still alive when Weber s book appeared: she died in
1723, not 171 *">! Quite properly, the English and French

translations

ded killing off the living T

Dowager, but substituted

As lor

idow of the T

Yleksei. the

k n o\v

N

171.5. Weber was confused. There remains another possi¬
bility suggested by Vasilkov: The Tsarina Dowager
Marfa Matveevna Apraksina, widow of Fedor 111 Alek¬
seevich, who in fact died on December 31, 1715, but
whom Weber never mentions.

A famous surfeit of lampreys once brought about the
death of an English sovereign. It would be singularly
fitting, given the Russian addiction to mushrooms, that
a surfeit of mushrooms should have precipitated the end
of an exalted personage in the Russian Imperial house¬

hold. On the likelihood that Weber had a specific death

[ 113 ]

in mind, we choose to think that Marla Matveevna died
of a gluttonous appetite lor mushrooms at Christmastide
in 1T1 <5, the autopsy revealing the cause of her death,
that cause supplying History with her only claim on
lasting tame.

So much lor the famous men and women whose deaths
have been attributed rightly or wrongly to mushrooms.
This mortuary procession of alleged mushroomic victims
would be incomplete if we did not here add the murders
revealed by l'affaire Cfirard. In this ease the victims were
persons of no consequence: their very names are for¬
gotten. Hut the circumstances that brought them to
their deaths are, for mycophiles anti epicures of crime,
both instructive and fascinating.

The standard mushroom manuals of France, like those
of Fngland, have always been saturated with mycopho-
bie caution. By overstating the toxic dangers of various
species, they have aimed at assuring the safety of their
readers. Hut, through a strange conjuncture of events,
that verv bias once contributed to the disastrous end of
a man who trusted lus mushroom manual too much.
Such is the lesson to be learned from this police episode.

(iirard's murders would doubtless have drawn wide
attention if the press stories had not broken at the pre¬
cise moment of the great spring offensive of 1918, the
final vear of the first World War. Ciirard was a Parisian,
and his accomplices were his wife and his mistress. lie
murdered only his friends, after insuring their lives in
his own favor. Poisons were his instrument, and among
other poisons he used toadstools gathered for him in the

forest of Kambouillet by an old hobo known as le pere
Theo, whose testimony later was damning to the ac¬
cused. From time to time Ciirard would order from

Theo a mess of amanitas: they had to have white gills

C,_ -

veil, and volva—the stigmata of the deadly amanita, but

also o {Amanita mappa and citrina. Girard and his wife
would serve these fungi to their victims at sumptuous
dinners in their own apartment. Sometimes the guest
went home and after a lingering illness died, but on
other occasions, to the surprise and discomfiture of the
Girards, the intended victim suffered no ill effects. In¬
deed, a number of them lived to give their evidence to
the police.

In 1918 the standard mushroom manual of France was
l*aul Dumee's. Like all of the over-cautious manuals of
that time, it lumped Amanita citrina with the deadly

ones.

Girard had

distinguish the lethal amanitas when instructing old
Theo about the mushrooms to gather. Thus it came
about that when Theo brought in a mess of Amanita
phalloides , the victim would enjoy a dish of tasty mush¬
rooms and later die. But when Theo produced specimens
of innocent A. citrina , the intended victim must have
found them less pleasant to the taste, and that was the
end of the matter. For the deadly amanita makes a de¬
lectable dish, whereas its relative the innocent citrina
scarcely rises palate-wise to the mediocre level.

Thus it may be said that Girard was deceived and

W

misled by Dumee's over-cautious manual, with the re¬
sult that some of his friends and intended victims un¬
wittingly survived his honest efforts to do them in, and

led

in the law's toils. Now
mproved, ( .irard's mis-

Seri

H

be repeated. Had Girard hailed
Fabre's village in the Provenc

he

would have known from childhood not to rely on Dumee,
for these peasants need no manuals.

Girard's crimes would have been forgotten, had it not
happened that Camille Fauvel, that prodigious myco-
phile, was a Commissairc de Police in Paris at the time.

11.3

and though he was not handling the Girard case, having
lately been charged with the more famous and important
but less interesting Mata Mari dossier, he followed it

with expert attention, even interviewing Girard

in

Fresnes prison after the conviction, in the interests of
myeological lore. Fauvel published an admirable narra¬
tive of the affair many years later, in the Supplement to
the issues of June and August. 1of the Revue ile
Myeologie , and we have drawn our facts from his account.
It should be added that Girard died in his prison bed of
tuberculosis a few days after he was interviewed, never

ulmitted

had relied

unsound advice of Dumee. Hut Fauvel s inference is
based upon evidence that leaves little room for doubt.

All that we have set forth in this chapter up to now—
the description of the singular properties of lethal mush¬
rooms, the inadequacy of mystery writers when they deal
with this theme, our comments on alleged poisonings of
eminent personages and the mushroomic murders of un¬
important folk—has had only one purpose: to equip the
reader for a reconsideration of the death of the Fmpcror
Claudius in A. I). 54. ()n that occasion, the whole of the
Roman Fmpire and the known world swung on a dish
ot poisoned mushrooms. The accounts in the ancient
writings of that famous event are an old, old story, fa¬
miliar to all students of antiquity. Those texts have been
parsed by students, dissected by historians, pondered by
moralists for close on twenty centuries, it would seem
that by now every conceivable interpretation must have
been hit upon, and the resources of scholarly inquiry
exhausted. Indeed, the signs of exhaustion are not lack¬
ing: in our own generation Guglielmo Ferraro in his

The // omen of the Caesars has not only struggled to
exonerate Agrippina of the dreadful charge laid at her

door, but to portray her as a noble Homan matron!

It would be surprising if at this late date fresh evidence
shedding light on Claudius’s death were discovered, and
yet this is what we think we have done. We rely solely
on the same worn texts, and we entrust our fate to the
verdict of scholars far more learned than we. Those old
texts have a message to deliver to us that can be dis¬
sected only by one who is a lover of mushrooms, and

4/ 4/

above all an amateur of venomy—amateur in the sense
of a critical but passive observer of those who have prac¬
ticed that subtle art.

Let us recall the background of the crime. Claudius
succeeded Caligula as emperor in the year 41, at the age
of 51. By his third wife, Messalina, he had had a son,

4/ 7

Britannicus, born the year before his accession. After

*

executing Messalina for adultery, he married his niece
Agrippina, who by a previous marriage had a son of her
own, three years senior to Brittanieus; and her son was
destined to worldly immortality as the Emperor Nero.

%/ 4/ L

Indeed, Agrippina’s motive in murdering her husband
was to assure the succession to Nero, in which endeavor
success crowned her efforts. Claudius at the time of his
death was said to be favoring Britannicus, and it was
even bruited that he had bequeathed the Empire to
Britannicus in a will that Agrippina destroyed.

From A. I). 50 the youth to be known to posterity as
Nero had as his tutor Seneca the Eider, and at the time
of the crime Seneca was an intimate of the imperial
circle, probably privy to all that took place at Court.
He could have left us the inside story of what happened,
but instead he veils his remarks in satire—the prudent
evasion of one who undoubtedly knew too much. Three
of the ancient historians have given us accounts of the
event. Tacitus, who was born probably in the year after
Claudius's death, wrote his narrative about sixty years

later; Suetonius’s version came a lew years alter that;
and Dio Cassius told the storv again almost two centuries
alter the event. These three secondary sources differ

w

among themselves in details, which gives to their atrree-

«

ment on essentials a stamp of verisimilitude. I n the main
they were not copying each other, and they probably
had the important facts right.

Claudius was exceedingly fond of the mushrooms
known to the
dition has it

Romans as bolcti: indeed a plausible tra¬

ins

kind was what we know

today as Amanita cacsarca. (In antiquity boleti meant
what mycologists since Linnaeus’ day have called the

» O »

amanitas.) The dish of mushrooms that he ate on the
fateful day consisted of poisoned, not poisonous mush¬
rooms. On this all three of the ancient historians agree.

in different words. None identities the poison that was
used, but they are abundantly clear that poison was added
to the Lmperor’s favorite dish. Here is Tacitus, Rook
XII, Chap. Ixvii of the ^tnnals in the Loeb edition:

Adeoque cuncta mox pernotuere, lit temporurn illoruin scriptures
prodiderint intusuin delectabili cibo boleto venenuni.

So notorious, later, were the whole proceedings that authors of
the period have recorded that the poison was sprinkled on an
exceptionally fine mushroom.

Suetonius gives two versions, in Rook V, Chap, xliv, in
the I ,oeb edition :

Kt veneno quidem occisum convenit; ubiautem et per quern dato,
discrepat. (Juidam tradunt epulanti in arce cum sacerdotibus per
I lalotum spadonem praegustatorem : alii domestico convivio per
ipsarn Agrippinam, quae boletum medicatum avidissimo ciborum
taliuin optulerat.

That Claudius was poisoned is the general belief, but when it was
done and by whom is disputed. Some say that it was his taster,
the eunuch Halotus, as he was banqueting on the Citadel with
the priests; others that at a family dinner Agrippina served the
drug to him with her own hand in mushrooms, a dish of which

he was extravagantly fond.

Suetonius places the poisoned mushrooms only in his
alternative account, but mushrooms could have been the
vehicle that Halotus used too, and this may be implied.
DioC assius comes down to 11 s in a Greek summary. In
Book LX I I ie accuses Agrippina of having put the poison
into ‘one of the vegetables called mushrooms*, for mush¬
room the Greek text using the word [avst/s. A few pages
later Dio Cassius refers again to the same poison when
he says:

Agrippina was ever ready to attempt the most daring under¬
takings: for example, she caused the death of Marcus Junius
Silanus, sending him some of the poison with which site had
treacherously murdered her husband.

What poison did Agrippina use \ This much we know :
she turned for advice and aid to a woman named Locusta,
an experienced artist in the preparation of* poisons, as
o Cassius puts it. According to Tacitus, the instruc-
ns of the Emnress to Locusta were narrowly defined.

13

The ooison was not to be

and instantaneous in

its operation, lest the desperate achievement should be
discovered. On the other hand, if the effect was slow and
consuming. Claudius as his end approached might dis¬
cover the treachery and take steps to thwart the perpe¬
trators in their ultimate purposes. (He might, that is to
say, proclaim Britannicus as his heir.) Something subtle
was needed, which would take time but also, at the ap-

ted hour, dei

the victim of his faculties. As

Tacitus goes on to say, by Locusta's skill

poison was

pared

r n

1

desired

passage in the Annals ol

Tacitus beimi a crux in our argument

Turn Agrippina seeleris olim certa et oblatae occasionis propera
nec ministrorum egens, de genere veneni consultavit, ne repen-
tino et praecipiti facinus proderetur; si lentum et tabidum dele-
gisset, ne admotus supremis Claudius et dolo intellecto ad aniorem
rilii rediret. Kxquisitum aliquid placebat, quod turbaret inentem
et mortem ditferret.

r 1191

It was then that Agrippina, long since bent upon the impious
deed, and eagerly seizing the present occasion, well furnished
too as she was with wicked agents, deliberated upon the nature

of the poison she would

, whether, if it were sudden and in¬

stantaneous in its operation, the desperate achievement would
not be brought to light: if she chose materials slow and con¬
suming in their operation, whether Claudius, when his end ap¬
proached, and perhaps having discovered the treachery, would
not resume his affection for his son*. Something of a subtle na¬
ture was therefore resolved upon, such as would disorder his
brain and require time to kill’. [Oxford translation, Annuls,
Hook XII, Chap. 6b.

There was only one poison available to the ancients
that would fulfill Agrippina’s requirements—the poison
of the deadly amanita. The victim would not give awav
the game by any abnormal indisposition at the meal, but
when the seizure came, he would be so severely stricken
that thereafter he would no longer be in command of
his own faculties. For one familiar with the properties
o\' Amanita p/ialIonics the text in Tacitus seems trans¬
parently clear. The great Roman historian, probably
unaware of the meaning behind his words, is revealing
the secret of the murderers. But for others than myeo-
philes there might remain a doubt: is it legitimate for
us to infer that Locusta knew the deadly amanita and
its secret virtue to which even now, after nineteen cen¬
turies, few are privy {

This question troubled and challenged us, not because
we were uncertain but because it would be hard to carry
conviction with an uninitiated public. Once more we
reviewed all the principal sources, all the stray allusions
in the classical writers. We concentrated especially on
Seneca. After all, he was a witness whose testimony
would have been competent in our own courts of justice:
he was articulate, and had he not carried the secret etched
sharp in his memory from that fateful October day in
A. I). .54 until his death eleven years later!' Somewhere.

120

if only by inadvertence, he must have talked, and per¬
haps his revealing words had survived, their esoteric
meaning hitherto unperceived. We embarked on a read¬
ing of all his extant writings. We began with his later
works, composed after the death of the Emperor, and
tried to orient each sentence toward that event. Suddenly
one day we came upon the tell-tale phrase: it leaped at
us from the page, fairly shouting at us. Yes, surely with
sly intention Seneca had imparted the fateful secret to
all knowing readers. And before us not a single com¬
mentator had ever caught the inner meaning of the
simple words.

We refer the reader to Letter XCY that the old Stoic
w 7 rote to his friend Lucilius nine or ten years after the
death of the Emperor and one or two years before he
took his own life on Nero's orders. In it he describes
and deplores the excesses of the Roman upper class. He
refers to the late Emperor's gluttony:

l)i boni, quantum bominum unus venter exercet! Quid? Tu illos
boletos, voluptarium venenum, nihil occulti operis iudicas facere,
etiam si praesentanei non fuerunt.

Good gods ! What a number of men does one belly employ ! But
ean you think those mushrooms (a tasty poison ) do not secretly
and gradually operate, though no bad effect is immediately per¬
ceived from them? [Loeb translation]

He re is proof that Seneca knew Amanitap/ialloidcs, that
an intimate of Nero's circle was privy to a secret shared
by few even today. So far as w r e know 7 , we are the first
to link these lines with the death of Claudius. To us the
tell-tale sentence seems to be injected into the letter out
of context, as though the writer were blurting out the
secret with which he had been living all these years, per¬
haps blurting it out intentionally, for the benefit of those
who could read between his lines.

The period of silent invasion, that veritable signature
of the lethal mushroom, was familiar to Seneca, and he

even took pains to mention how tasty the wicked mush¬
room was. How much guilty knowledge packed into a
tew words! Read in conjunction with the Empress
Agrippina's instructions to Locusta, we believe it
clinches our case. The poison in the dish of Caesar's
amanitas was the poison of the deadly amanita. Two of
our authors, Suetonius and Tacitus, give us grounds for
supposing that the administration of the poison was en¬
trusted to the eunuch Halotus. whose ollice it was to

taste the Emperor's food before serving it to him. Taci¬
tus says that a person unnamed (presumably Ilalotus)
poured the poison into the dish of mushrooms. It would
have been easy for Eocusta to prepare a sauce from the
deadly specimens, and by enlisting the aid of Halotus,
no suspicion would be aroused by the failure to serve it
to others at the feast. However, this is a detail, impor¬
tant at the time to the participants of course, but second¬
ary to the primary fact that the ancient writers are telI-
ing usexactlv how Eocusta handled the assignment with

which Agrippina charged her. We believe that the secret
of those two fearless and wicked women is withheld from
us no longer. (Eatinists and mycologists will note that
Seneca uses the word boletus for the deadly amanita:
clearly it was the term for all amanitas, not merely
s / man it a cues a rca .)

We rest our ease on the knowledge shown by Seneca
and the quoted passage from Tacitus, taken together.
Rut there is additional circumstantial evidence compati¬
ble with our theory. The crime was committed on Octo-
her 1*2—in the season when the deadly amanita could be

m/

easily found around Rome. ()n the morrow after Claudius
had eaten the mushrooms and while he was yet alive,
comedians were introduced into his presence to solace
and delight him, as Suetonius says. Since any such kind

intention was foreign to Agrippina's nature, and a for-

tiori at the dreadful moment that we are considering, we
may assume that her purpose was different: the comic
actors were to bear witness in the public market-place
that the Emperor had not been killed but was in truth
desperately ill, and the Hippocratic facies that we know
he must have manifested gave them full warranty for

C _ 1 %/

such a report. Immediately after Claudius's death, he
was proclaimed a god—a posthumous honor for emperors
to which Romans were accustomed. Afterwards, when
Nero was in secure possession of his imperial office, he
was present at a certain banquet where mushrooms were
brought in, and someone alluded to the saying common
at that time that mushrooms were ‘the food of the gods',
cibus dear urn. fipbopa. 'To this Nero is said to have

replied: ‘True enough: my father was made a god by
eating a mushroom.' (This story is told by Suetonius,
Dio Cassius, and Petrus Patricius.) Nero's remark is
clothed with wit if he was referring to the deadly ama¬
nita, and not merely to a dish of edible mushrooms that
had been poisoned ; and Nero was in a position to know.

In spite of Locusta's artistry, we know that her bold
stroke was botched, and this leads us to the second part
of the crime. The time schedule alone tells us that some¬
thing went awry. Claudius sat down to his fatal banquet
around 2:.‘30 p.m. on October P2. At or shortly after
noon the next day he was dead. The lethal amanitas do
not kill so quickly. We do not know at what stage in
the lengthy banquet he ate his mushrooms, but probably
not at the beginning. His seizure could not have taken
place before 9 p.m., and probably not before midnight
or later, which would mean that his agony lasted only

twelve hours. On its face this is impossible. We pointed

?rer .Amanita phalloidcs labors

urd

under one shortcoming: occasionally a victim recovers.
Agrippina could not afford this risk, and even if we had

no evidence to support our theory, we might assume that
she and Locusta, as their imperial patient lay at
mercy, resorted to direct methods to dispatch him. For¬
tunately, our texts come to our help.

‘The victim of the plot,' says Dio Cassius, ‘was car¬
ried from the banquet quite overcome by strong drink,
a thing that had happened many times before.* Sueton¬
ius's version is hesitant: ‘Of those accidents which also
ensued hereupon [af ter eating the mushrooms] the report
is variable. Some say that straight upon the receipt of
the poison he became speechless, and continuing all night
in dolorous torments died a little before day. Others
affirm that at first he fell asleep, and afterwards, as the
meat flowed and floated aloft, vomited all up.* (II it is
true that in his usual drunken stupor he threw up, this

send the

he

might have rid himself of the fungal poison: but perhaps
the vomiting came later, when the deadly amanitas finally
made themselves felt.) Tacitus is explicit: ‘Agrippina
therefore became dismayed : but as her life was at stake,
she thought little of the odium of her present proceed¬
ings, and called in the aid of Xenophon the physician,
whom she had already implicated in her guilty purposes.
It is believed that he, as if he purposed to assist Claudius
in his effort to vomit, put down his throat a feather be¬
smeared with deadly poison ; not unaware that in desper¬

ate villainies the attempt without the deed is perilous,
while to insure the reward they must be done effectually
at once.' There was thus a second poisoning, with the
Greek physician Xenophon replacing Locusta. Suetonius
says that, according to one report, the second poisoning
was by clyster.

w %

What was that poison to which Xenophon had hurried
recourse? Robert Graves in private correspondence offers
us an answer that fits the circumstances perfectly. Not

long after Claudius's death, a satire (attributed usually
to Seneca) was published on the emperor s deification

to which the author gave the title of Apocolocyntosis, an
artificial word inserting the Creek eolocynthis into the
middle of apotheosis. The colocynth (as we call this gourd
in English) was the Creek name used in Rome at the
time for a gourd recently introduced from the Near East.
When the title of the satire is translated the Pumpkinifi-
eation of Claudius, all its sap is drained out of the name:
a ‘pumpkin-head' means merely that Claudius was made

a dunce of, was ‘duncified'. Moreover, the botanist is
rendered uncomfortable by an anachronism: the pump¬
kins and squashes were introduced into Europe in the
15th century, being native to America. The Mediter¬
ranean shores knew other cucurbits, but not the pump¬
kins and squashes. Scholars who use ‘pumkinification*.
miss the point of Apocolocyntosis.

The 'colocjmth' as used in Rome at that time is not
edible. It is exceedingly bitter, whence its name ‘the
bitter gourd'. It is not native to I taly, but was imported
from the arid areas of the Near East, notably Palestine.
This is the famous gourd that responded to Elisha's
miraculous powers in 11 Kings, Chapter 4, verses J38-41 :

And Elisha came againe to Gilgal, and there was a dearth in the
land, and the sonnes of the Prophets were sitting before him:
and hee said unto his seruant. Set on the great pot, and seethe
pottage for the sonnes of the Prophets.

And one went out into the field to gather herbes, and found a
wild vine, and gathered thereof wilde gourds his lap full, and
came and shred them into the pot of pottage: for they knew
them not.

So they poured out for the men to eat: and it came to passe as
they were eating of the pottage, that they cried out, and said,
O thou man of God, there is death in the pot. And they could
not eate thereof.

Hut be said, Then bring meale. And he cast it into the pot:
And he said, poure out for the people, that they may eat. And
there was no harme in the pot.

i n minimal doses the eoloeynth is a violent purgative;
in larger doses it is lethal. It happens that we know the
history of this drug in surprising detail. In the first een-
tury of the Christian era the upper classes of' Rome were
much concerned with their hea th : hypochondriasis was
rampant, anti miracle drugs were being discovered one
alter the other.' In A. 1). 423, when Claudius led a cam¬
paign into Britain, one Seribonius Largus was serving as

an army surgeon with his forces. Some scholars have
assumed that he then rose to the status ot' the Emperor s
private physician and that he was in attendance on j\Ies-

However this mav be

that C

Julius Callistus, a freedman who became a powerful
favorite of Claudius, encouraged Seribonius to assemble
and circulate a book of prescriptions, drawing these writ¬
ings to the attention of the Emperor. They are the
earliest of such writings that have come down to us in
Latin literature, and they must have exerted considera-
ble influence on the medical practice of that age. Among
them Prescription TOO employs eoloeynth, which Seribo¬
nius called by its Creek name, showing that it was at
that time a novelty introduced from the East. It proba¬
bly enjoyed considerable vogue among the elite and
fashionable of' Koine in the middle of the first century.
In the desperate extremity of that turbulent night of
October 1*2, A.I). 51, when the Greek physician Xeno¬
phon was called in consultation and permitted himself
to become a particcps criminis , it was natural for him to
come to the rescue of Locusta and Agrippina by dis¬
patching Claudius with an overdose of eoloeynth, ad-

‘ Some of the drills used in imperial Rome have survived in use
until recent times. One such is the agaric, and another is eoloeynth,
this latter having been the base for 'general issue’ purgative pills in
the British army in the first world war. We too, in the inid-tZOth
century, are witnessing a spate of miraculous pharmaceutical discover¬
ies, Will a single one of them be remembered in A.I). 3850?

r

120

ministered by mouth or clyster or both. This explains
the name that Seneca crave to his satire. Claudius’s last

words, as attributed to him bv Seneca, were: Vac me.

f

puto concacavi me —‘There now! I say, I have fouled
myself!', which would he apt for either colocynth or

the deadly amanita.

3

If then our reading of the text is right, Claudius was
done in with a one-two knock-out, first a dose of the

dly amanita, and then a dose of <
‘anotheosis*. the name of Seneca

A

tosis at last becomes clothed with wit: the deification of
an emperor is reduced to a repulsive scatological meta¬
morphosis. When, later, Agrippina did away with Mar¬
cus Junius Silanus (as Dio Cassius tells us), it was the
deadl} T amanita that she used, and not colocynth: for
colocynth proclaims its presence by its bitterness, and
an intended victim would spew it out forthwith.

At noon on October 13 the gates of the imperial pal¬
ace in Home swung open, and Nero, then a youth of 17,
emerged and presented himself as the new emperor to
the army detachment that was on guard there. The
Emperor Claudius was dead, or in extremis. There could
have been no reason, only danger, in prolonging the in¬
terval between the death of the old emperor and the
assumption of authority by the new.

And so we bring our review of Claudius's death to an
end. The three ancient historians who tell us the storv
were not clinicians. Their accounts, differing sharply in
the unessential details, give us a surprisingl}’ clear and
consistent overall clinical picture. This is circumstantial
evidence of virtually conclusive weight that they were
telling the truth. They could not severally have invented

O J •/

For information concerning tbe early use of colocynth in tome,
the best source is Wilhelm Schonack's scholarly stud}’ Die Rezepl-
sammlung des Scribonius Largtts , published in Jena in 19 F2.

a combination of symptoms, and a sequence of events,
that two thousand years later would speak for themselves.

Our sources say that a curtain of secrecy had shrouded
the palace during the illness of Claudius. It is tempting
to try to reconstruct the scenes in the imperial palace
before and during the crime. The plot had been laid
earlier in whispered conversations between Agrippina
and Locusta in some safe spot to which Locusta had

been furtively summoned. How

Locusta must

have been by her great assignment: the world offered
none bigger for a person in her line of work. Locusta,
if she possessed imagination as well as art. may well have
leaped with excitement at the thought that this deed.

artfully accomplished, would bring her immortality : and
indeed it has done so. Hut during that fateful night the
tension must have been unbearable. Had their victim
foiled their efforts prematurely from drunkenness, by
vomiting before the poisonous amanita had done its
damage t M ight he survive and resume the exercise of

imperial functions?' Was Locusta vexed, her professional
pride hurt, when Xenophon was called in, or was she
relieved? With what anxious eyes Locusta and Agrip¬
pina must have searched each other's ill-lighted faces as
the hours crept on! Hut in any case, with his enemies
in command at his bedside, Claudius stood no chance.

The triumph of Agrippina and her fellow conspirators
bestowed on them all power. They may well have gloated
in their success, and were so situated that they could talk
with a large measure of impunity. In the writings of
Seneca and the three historians, one seems to hear echoes
of veiled boasting, as though Locusta and .Agrippina

were dying to tell just how they had contrived their ends.
Their words were veiled, in homage to virtue, but thinly,

and lend themselves to understanding by the initiated,
if only across a chasm of nineteen centuries.

r

128